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iPage WordPress Hosting Review

Known as a budget web hosting provider, iPage provides a single cheap WordPress hosting package with rich features. However, is the package able to meet the requirements to run WordPress sites optimally? We come out this review based on our own WordPress hosting experience and the reviews we have received from iPage customers. The answer can be found from the in-depth iPage WordPress hosting review.

For the evaluation of a web host, we have to mention the core aspects which will influence your hosting experience. They are price, feature, uptime, speed, and support. Each of them comes with many details to reveal the secret behind the appearance. This enables you to have a clear idea before the subscription.

iPage WordPress Hosting Review on Price

Since its inception in 1998, iPage has been offering a single web hosting plan which is $7.99/mo regularly. As a promotion is going on, people who subscribe to the plan now can get the price down to $1.99/mo. Note that this low price is only valid for 36 months subscription. For those who want a 12-month package, the price is $2.99/mo. With the selection of 2-year billing term, users need to pay $2.49/mo for the plan. Renewal prices are $7.99/mo, $8.99/mo, and $9.99/mo for 3/2/1-year payment.

iPage WordPress Hosting Review on Feature

The single iPage plan includes rich features needed for hosting WordPress sites, such as unlimited disk space, bandwidth, hosted domains, SFTP, PHP 5, MySQL 5 and 1-click installer. Besides, PayPal is also available for customers to ensure the security of their purchase.

Are these things good enough to host a WordPress site? Not really. The plan is still far away from being an ideal option, as it comes with the following demerits in terms of features.

iPage doesn't support Cron Jobs, which may cause troubles in running some important WordPress plugins like Google XML SiteMap.

iPage doesn't allow PHP to run as suPHP to increase the security of WordPress sites.

The anytime money back guarantee is not valid for customers paying via PayPal.

iPage utilizes a custom built vDeck control panel instead of the most popular cPanel, which may lead to problems for those people transferring from another web host to get started.

iPage WordPress Hosting Review on Uptime

Different from competitors, iPage does not offer an uptime guarantee to the public. However, their uptime records are accessible through Pingdom, a monitoring tool. For a quite long period of time, iPage can keep their average uptime over 99.9%. The reason lies in that it never stops the steps to improve the security of data centers, network, and so on. There is no constant downtime with iPage.

iPage WordPress Hosting Review on Speed

For WordPress users, speed always tops the concern list. As a survey indicates, when a page takes over 2 seconds to load, it gets 17% of visitors inpatient. In addition, a WordPress site with slow loading speed has less possibility to get a good ranking on Google.

We have hosted a WordPress site with iPage for approximately 3 months. Honestly speaking, we are not so satisfied with the performance of our site. As we monitored, the server response time of iPage averages at 550ms, much slower than most other excellent web hosts, and a WordPress post page usually takes over 3 seconds to load. Read the real-time monitoring statistics of the past 30 days in the following chart.

iPage WordPress Hosting Review on Technical Support

iPage is a large web hosting company which provides praise-worthy technical support. The extensive support center includes a knowledgebase and multiple user guides, with which customers can easily help themselves out most of the common problems they may meet in hosting their WordPress sites.

Also, iPage has 24x7 human powered support service with technicians knowledgeable on WordPress and reachable via phone, live chat and email. Every time we asked them for help, they were patient and friendly.

Is iPage Recommended for WordPress Hosting?

iPage offers cheap price and helpful technical support, yet we don't recommend it to WordPress users because the companies hasn't performed well enough in the speed and features.

We've been an independent web hosting review site, and have reviewed 200+ web hosts since 2006 - trying to help web masters find the best hosting deals based on the budget and requirement, including shared web hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers.